RPM challenge requiem

March is over.

The goal was 10 songs or 35 minutes.

Yeah, I failed.

I have seven unfinished songs.  Just one guitar part, a bass part, and a drum machine part for each song.  No melody and no lyrics.  So yeah I failed.  That’s the bad news. 

The good news is that prior to tonight, every time I sat down with the plan to come up with something new I managed to pull it off.  Granted, everything I have is terrible, but at least it’s there.  Tonight I tried for a while and came up with a couple of things, but was unable to turn either idea into anything more. 

While trying to come up with 10 new songs I managed to make dippy little 8-track demos for 12 old songs.  10 of them are pretty much finished although a couple still need some tweeking.  That’s all good.  The upside of this is that I’ve been playing, and my guitar has been used for something other than a dust magnet.

I didn’t complete the challenge, and I’m a little down about that… but I did get something accomplished which is more than I can say about the previous 24 months.  I’m going to keep at it.  Who knows, maybe I can get 10 complete songs done in April to go along with my seven from March.  I could be like Pink Floyd or Husker Du or Led Zeppelin or Jenny Toomey or Smashing Pumpkins (how’s that for artists that normally don’t get mentioned in the same breath) and release a double album of all studio material.  That would make me King Cool!

Or not

(I have to admit that I’ve never heard Jenny Toomey’s double record.  It was there in the new music rack back when WUML was still WJUL and we were temporarily working out of the production studio, but I never got around to playing it… we were actually pulling off the whole talk show thing at that point.  However, I do love a good Tsunami record, and lets be honest, I wouldn’t know cool if it jumped up and smacked me on the nose… to paraphrase.)